🎼 March 2025: How Music Represents
Thinking about how to convey subtle ideas musically for my upcoming work, Holy Saturday.
Hello, everyone! I’m Chris Krycho, your friendly local (well, local-to-some-few-of-you) composer of contemporary classical music (or whatever we call it these days?) and it is the end of March! Let’s get into it!
🎼 On the craft
If you’d like, you can watch a video version of this essay here:
One, how does music represent? For that matter, does music represent? Two, how does orchestration impact any such interpretation?
I have these two questions on my mind because I’ve been working on a piece for Holy Saturday this year. I have been thinking along the way about what it is I want to convey in the piece; and I have been scoring it for a couple different ensembles. So those questions are on my mind for fairly obvious reasons.
Last year I wrote The Desert: a meditative and minimalist piano piece inspired by the works of Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, and others in the “holy minimalist” tradition: Attempting to convey the sense of loneliness one might have spending 40 days alone in the desert, as Jesus did in his temptation, and thus the 40 days of Lent.
Similarly, this year's project with Holy Saturday is a rumination on the experience that the followers of Jesus may have had that day between his death and his resurrection, and that Christians have reflecting on that day now.
There is a deep-seated tension in Holy Saturday. For Jesus’ disciples, it was not a day of joy but of confusion, sorrow, dismay.
For a Christian, living after the fact, it is a quiet day at the end of Lent, a day that stands between the solemn remembrance of our Lord’s death and our joyous, even raucous celebration of his resurrection. It is a quiet day. But it is also a day of anticipation: We know what is coming. What is coming is resurrection. What is coming is the ringing of bells and voices shouting “Alleluia!” as the church acclaims its risen Lord.
The disciples knew none of that. They had no hope because they did not understand what their Lord had said to them. They were in darkness, and they had not, as far as they understood it, seen a great light. They had seen: death.
So in writing this piece, as in writing the meditation for Lent last year, I am trying to convey that emotion, that sense, that feeling, through the texture of the music, through the setting of that texture.
As you will hear when the piece comes out in a few weeks, the motif I chose for this is the steady ticking away of a clock. An anachronism, to be sure. They had no such clock. But it conveys well the sense for us. The steady thump thump thump of the instruments conveying the steady tick tick tick of a clock: one second, after another, after another, in a day that seems it will go on and on and on and what comes next we know not. And I have written it as a steady pedal tone: no motion whatsoever. Dynamics, yes; but no motion in that steady thrumming in the cellos or the contrabass or the piano: so it serves as a marker of time passing, but without a sense of progress.
It simply sits. It stays. It waits. It waits. It waits, it knows not what for. Because that is what they waited for: They knew not.
And yet: this is a work addressed to an audience that is not confused disciples on the day between the days, but to Christians, or at least people who understand something of the Christian story. It cannot be only stasis. It cannot be only darkness and despair. It must also hint at hope.
So it must somehow convey both the creeping dread they experienced: Are we next? Will we die crucified as well? And even if not, where do we go from here? But also, our sense of what is coming tomorrow: those bells ringing, those shouted alleluias, the feast after.
Now, there are more and less direct versions of this. The approach I have taken here is relatively direct, in part because this project is one I undertook on a relatively short time frame, which grew directly out of a thought that I had sitting in our Ash Wednesday service a few weeks ago. But for all its relative directness, it is not a simple piece. The melodic and harmonic motion cannot, and so do not, convey purely grief and darkness or hopeful expectancy and coming light. They mingle.
I wrote the piece in G Minor, and stay there with little motion. The pedal tone in the work is simply a G, both sustained and pulsing: whether by sostenuto pedal in the piano version of the work, or with a mix of pizzicato and flautando strings in the version for a small string ensemble, or leaning on the tubular bells and doubling pizzicato low strings with a harp to do the same in the chamber orchestra version. Then the melody runs mostly in the minor key, with little deviations here and there throughout the first part that mostly serve to make things feel stranger, rather than particularly more hopeful, and it moves around somewhat but always comes very strongly back “home” to that G Minor chord. But the deviations from G Minor are not into adjacent keys but rather into the pitches from G Major, so they hint that things are not quite what they seem. When the piece ends with an implied C Major and then a clear G Major chord (for the nerds: from IV6 to I), it has the very appropriate effect of a plagal cadence: the sound of the “Amen” at the end of a hymn… but with the motion clearly lifting, because of the voicing I chose. Easter Sunday is coming.
Representation in art is never a simple thing, and with music, and especially instrumental music, it must be indirect. It conveys those emotions, but it cannot convey, really, more than those emotions. It can transport you, it can leave you with a sense of wonder or sorrow, delight or distress, but it does so always only by suggestion. And I find that fascinating as a challenge for art in general, and music specifically, to convey something that matters, something like the long, dreadful, hopeful day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, with only the tools of texture and voicing and melody and harmony and rhythm at one's disposal.
I hope you enjoy the piece when it goes live on Good Friday, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on it then!
🎵 Other notes
A discovery earlier this month that is wildly different from most of my listening, and quite good but very specific: Grace Davidson has a beautiful soprano voice, and the album Grace is a collaboration with composer Patrick Thomas Hawes which features her voice as an instrument in small chamber ensemble settings. These are not “songs” as you would normally think of them; they are more akin to what you might think of as works for solo flute or solo violin, but for a soprano vocalist instead.
I very much enjoyed this, and it also gave me a good excuse to start poking at some of Patrick Hawes’ works, which were new to me and are very good, including a great deal of sacred and other choral music.
🎤 Links, updates, &c.
As implied by today’s essay, the main update here is that Holy Saturday is inbound. It will be released on Good Friday (and I will send a bonus issue then, so you’ll be sure to be able to hear it!), linking to it on all the distributors. You can also follow me on Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, or any other service to get notified, of course.
The work will be released as an EP, featuring three versions:
- for solo piano
- for violin, viola, cello, and contrabass1
- for chamber orchestra: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, tubular bells, harp, and full string sections
This will be a rather different recording than you have heard from me before. For reasons of cost and time, I have not recorded this with those ensembles. Instead, I have made use of the high-quality samples that I have purchased over the years, always from a group that pays ongoing loyalties to the musicians who recorded those studios. The sole exception here is the piano recording, for which I used our beautiful Yamaha upright.
I would love to record these properly, and perhaps at some point in the future I’ll be able to issue a revised version with musicians and a recording studio; but for now, this will have to do!
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👋🏼 Happy March!
Thanks for reading and listening. I am very excited to bring you Holy Saturday in just a few weeks, and then to get back into the weeds of working on my Symphony No. 1.
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Not a string quartet! Because it really needs that thrumming low contrabass to work just so. ↩